The penniless new émigré now had two choices – work or starve. He chose the former and set off in search of work among the mercantile stores lining Tchoupitoulas Street. By 7 a.m. he had walked the full length of the street without seeing a single sign in any window offering employment. At the end of the street he noticed a middle-aged gentleman with a silky black beard seated reading a newspaper in front of Store No. 3, his chair tilted at a leisurely angle against the door. He wore a dark alpaca suit and a tall hat and the boy assumed he was proprietor of the store, over which hung a sign announcing that these were the premises of ‘Speake & McCreary, Wholesale and Commission Merchants’. The boy took a deep breath and asked: ‘Do you want a boy, sir?’
Startled by the question, the man sat up and replied in a northern English accent: ‘No, I do not think I want one. What should I want a boy for? Where do you hail from? You are not an American.’ The boy told the gentleman more than he was expecting to hear: how he had arrived from Liverpool on a packet-ship, taken on as a cabin boy, tricked into becoming a deck hand, abused by older crew members, his pay withheld and, finally, how he had jumped ship the previous night.
The gentleman tilted his chair back again and noticing a book in the boy’s pocket, asked if he could read. The boy proudly showed him the Bible presented at the workhouse and admitted that he could read. The gentleman read the inscription: ‘Presented to John Rowlands by the Right Revd. Thomas Vowler Short, D. D., Lord Bishop of St. Asaph, for diligent application to his studies, and general good conduct. January 5th, 1855’. Returning the Bible, he pointed to an article in his newspaper and told the boy to read it aloud. The boy duly read out a newspaper story about a legislative assembly; the man then enquired if he could also write. ‘Yes, sir, with a good round hand, as I have been told’, and to prove it, he borrowed a pencil and copied out an address written on a label attached to some coffee sacks.
The gentleman appeared impressed with these accomplishments and called inside the store to ask when Mr Speake might be returning. A voice from within answered that he would be back after nine. ‘Well, we have ample time before us. As I don’t suppose you’ve breakfasted yet, you had better come along with me.’
As they walked along the wharf, the gentleman told John Rowlands that first impressions were important and he feared that if Mr Speake spotted cotton fluff on the boy’s jacket and unkempt hair, he might not be induced to look at him twice or trust him with his grocery stock. After an American breakfast of waffles, doughnuts and coffee in a restaurant, he was taken for a haircut, wash and brush up before returning to the store to meet Mr James Speake, proprietor. At their meeting, Mr Speake asked if it were true he was seeking work, because if it was, he was prepared to offer a week’s trial at 5 dollars – ‘and if we find we suit each other, the place will be permanent. Are you agreeable?’
The boy struggled to express his thanks to the stranger and Mr Speake, but was lost for words. The men made light of it and the stranger told the boy he was about to go upriver but would soon return and expected to hear good reports of his progress.
As soon as the gentleman had gone, John Rowlands, newly appointed shop assistant at Speake & McCreary, New Orleans, began work alongside other assistants. From one he learned that the gentleman who had been instrumental in his good fortune was a commercial broker who, with his brother, acted as a middleman between upriver planters and merchants in New Orleans, Havana and the West Indies. The gentleman shared an office in the store and conducted a good deal of business with Speake & McCreary. From another he discovered that the gentleman was called Henry Hope Stanley, who lived with his wife in a fine house in St Charles Avenue and that he travelled regularly up and down the river on business.
The boy’s first day as a shop assistant at Speake & McCreary included working with a pair of Mr Speake’s slaves, Dan and Samuel. As well as general provisions, the store also sold clothing, brandy, liqueurs and syrups. Goods were stored in warehouses and in attics at the top of the building and as soon as they were ready for collection, Dan and Samuel carried them to a fleet of delivery drays parked outside. It was Dan and Samuel who introduced the boy to his first lodging house and when they walked together towards the spacious wooden building in Thomas Street that would become his home, he noticed that their tin lunch boxes appeared particularly heavy as they moved down the road.
The house was owned by a young black woman called Mrs Williams who said she was prepared to charge him a rent low enough to leave something over at the end of the week. The previous night he had slept on a bale of cotton like a criminal on the run. Today he had a job, new friends and, for the first time in his life, a room of his own in a respectable house in the great city of New Orleans. He was just wondering if life could get any better when Mrs Williams entered his room and ‘in a most matter-of-fact way, assisted me to undress and took possession of my shirt and collar, saying they would be washed and ironed by morning, that I might look more “spruce”’. At the close of that momentous day, the boy knelt by his bed ‘and was reminded to give thanks to Him, who, like a father pitieth his children and them that fear Him’.
Early the next morning the boy was at the store’s front door. He loved his job and proved good at his work. A willingness to learn, take orders and jump to any task endeared him to Mr Speake. His confidence started to grow. For the first time in his life, someone was telling John Rowlands he was good at what he was doing. He was praised for his eager attitude and inwardly he swelled with pride, which was another new experience. Meanwhile, Dan and Samuel attempted to dampen his enthusiasm. ‘Take it easy, little boss, don’t kill yourself. Plenty of time. Leave something for tomorrow’, they would tell him as they settled back on a pile of coffee sacks for an afternoon nap.
At the end of the week, John was called to Mr Speake’s office and told his trial period had proved a success and he would be engaged as a junior clerk for $25 per month – a fortune for a boy who hitherto had only worked unpaid or been forced to hand his wages over to someone else. He worked out that he would be left with $15 to enjoy life at the end of each month and Mr Speake advanced the boy a month’s pay to buy new clothes.
Within weeks of arriving in America, John Rowlands became a different boy in temper, spirit and personality. He discovered that he could express opinions and people welcomed his views. In the land of free speech, John Rowlands started to shake off his reserve, to live and talk like an American. ‘My British antipathies and proclivities were dropping from me as rapidly as the littleness of my servile life was replaced by the felicities of freedom,’ he recollected some thirty years later.
Eighteen months after leaving the workhouse and less than three months after sailing from Liverpool, he had fallen in love with America, his attic room, his job, the busy streets, tasty food and relaxed atmosphere which existed in the city that had accepted him as one of its own. For John Rowlands, New Orleans became the city in which the workhouse boy was allowed to flourish and grow into a healthy and spirited young man.
Henry Hope Stanley re-entered John Rowlands’s life on his return from his upriver journey. He congratulated the boy on his smart appearance and confidentially revealed that Mr Speake was more than satisfied with his progress at the store. Mr Stanley handed his card to the boy and said he would be delighted if he could join him and Mrs Stanley for breakfast on Sunday at their St Charles Avenue home.
When John Rowlands arrived outside the pillared porticos and shady garden of Mr Stanley’s home, he found his host waiting in an easy chair on the verandah. He greeted the boy warmly and showed him inside where he was introduced to ‘a fragile little lady, who was the picture of refinement’. This was Mrs Frances Stanley, a woman now in her early thirties who had been beautiful in her youth, but whose vivacity had been robbed from her by years of illness. She greeted her young visitor and ushered him to a place at the table.
The perfectly groomed lady and her young guest impressed each other in equal measure. Although there were twelve others invited to the table that morning, John Rowlands felt ‘there was an almost impassable gulf between me and them. Their conversation was beyond my understanding, mostly, though I could spell and interpret each word; but the subjects of their talk left me in the clouds.’ Conversations with Mrs Stanley, however, were courteous and cordial and the lady of the house took pains to put the boy at ease.
A warm friendship grew up between John Rowlands and Henry Stanley and little by little the boy came to regard him as an older associate. To be in his company ‘was an education for one so ignorant as myself’ and the boy looked to the older man as a tutor and mentor.
Sunday breakfast with the Stanleys was the high spot of the boy’s week. Mrs Stanley became more considerate at each meeting and she and her husband encouraged the boy to read widely, recommending books, which could be purchased cheaply in New Orleans, and loaning other volumes. Without the Stanleys, ‘my love of books would have proved sufficient safeguard against the baser kind of temptations; but, with them, I was rendered almost impregnable to vice,’ he wrote. Breakfasts were followed by visits to the Episcopalian church where Mr Stanley occasionally officiated as a lay-preacher. Later there was a chance to relax and talk for the remainder of the day in the comfort of their spacious home.
After three months, Mr Speake increased the boy’s salary to $30 per month and informed his young employee that, thanks to John, the store had never been in such good order. It was while undertaking a routine check of warehouse stock that John Rowlands discovered something was wrong. Sacks and boxes that should have been heavy with the weight of provisions seemed strangely light. By turning his oil lamp on full, he noticed some coffee sacks appeared to have been bitten through by rats, but the quantity of beans spilt on the floor was out of proportion with the amount missing. When the boy took his lamp into storage lofts, he discovered wine and syrup barrels half empty and that entire boxes of biscuits and sardines had completely vanished. The boy checked the stock book, which revealed that incorrect sales figures had been entered into the records. So as not to cast suspicion on himself, he sought out Mr Speake and told him of the discovery.
The proprietor instructed staff to check the stock again, comparing goods in the warehouse with bills sent to customers. While searching the lofts, the boy moved a broom and discovered a lunch box hidden behind it. He reached down and found it heavy to lift. He flipped open the lid and found it full of golden syrup. A second lunch box nearby was full of Malmsey wine. They belonged to Dan and Samuel, who had been pilfering different goods each day, smuggling them out in their lunch boxes. On closer investigation, biscuits, sardines and other groceries were found concealed under floorboards and in dark recesses of the stockrooms.
Dan and Samuel had made themselves scarce in the gloomy shadows of the top floor loft and when questioned about missing items denied all knowledge, taking on an air of innocence. When challenged to produce their lunch boxes, they conveniently forgot where they had left them. When Mr Speake produced them and asked for the lids to be opened, they sank to their knees, confessed everything and begged forgiveness from their boss.
A constable was summoned and the slaves taken away ‘to receive on the next day such a flogging as only practised State officials know how to administer’. Dan was reinstated but Samuel was sent into the fields to labour as a cotton picker.
Henry Stanley heard everything about his young protégé from Mr Speake and paid him an early morning call at Mrs Williams’ boarding house. The older man was pleased to find the boy’s room clean and tidy and he carefully scrutinised his collection of cheap editions of popular classics. When the boy returned to his lodging house the following evening, he found a large parcel waiting for him. It contained a dozen books in green and blue covers bearing the names of Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Washington Irving, Oliver Goldsmith, Ben Johnson and others – a gift from Mr and Mrs Stanley.
Yellow fever and dysentery raged through New Orleans in the autumn of 1859. Mr Speake was taken ill and after a few days died, aged forty-seven. Mrs Speake sold her husband’s store to a pair of businessmen called Ellison and McMillan who dismissed the staff with the exception of the eighteen-year-old Welsh boy who had, by now, been promoted to the position of warehouse manager.
John Rowlands was now a confident young man about town. He had a responsible job with a regular income, a permanent address and a small circle of respectable friends with whom he was seen at church and promenading through the fashionable quarters of New Orleans. His only female companions at this time appear to have been the wives or daughters of his employers or customers and those he met at church. The boy was timid with the opposite sex, especially girls of his own age. He felt shy, uncomfortable and confused in their presence and was more at home with their mothers; particularly mothers interested in literature or tales from the darkest warehouse.
An example of how naïve he was at this time came when a new lodger arrived at Mrs Williams’ house. The landlady thought the ‘fair-haired lad of about my own age’ would be better off sharing a room with John because he was English and recently arrived from Liverpool. The new roommate was called Dick Heaton. He had worked his passage to New Orleans as a cabin boy on the Pocahontas, where he had received the same rough treatment on the high seas as his new friend. Dick was clever and intelligent, ‘though not educated’. John could not help noticing ‘an unusual forward inclination of Dick’s body, a leanness of the shoulders, compared to the fullness below the waist’, causing him to remark casually that he walked more like a girl than a boy.
At night the boys shared a bed and John noticed that Dick was so modest he would only undress after snuffing out the candle. When he climbed into bed, he lay on the edge taking care not to come into contact with his bedfellow. In the morning he lay in bed fully clothed, which he explained by saying that during his sea crossing he had been thrashed for taking so long to get dressed ‘and had scarcely dared take off his boots during the whole voyage’.
The boys traded stories about unhappy childhoods. John told Dick about his Atlantic crossing and Dick revealed he had protected himself from thrashings by padding the seat of his trousers with cotton while howling loudly as the kicks and blows showered down. If the new lodger mentioned other liberties the crew had taken on the journey to America, they remained unrecorded.
The boys spent their days off exploring New Orleans. One morning when John woke early to leave for the store, he noticed Dick, still asleep with ‘what I took to be two tumours on his breast’. When Dick awoke he asked what was the matter. ‘Pointing to his open breast, I anxiously inquired if those were not painful.’ Dick rudely told John to mind his own business, but it slowly dawned on John – such were the buttoned up times in which they lived – that Dick was in fact a girl, disguised in boy’s clothing.
The impostor admitted the truth, telling John ‘her’ name was Alice Heaton from Everton, Liverpool, who had lived with an ageing grandmother who had ill-treated her. She dreamed of running away from her harsh life and had heard wonderful stories about America. The girl had managed to scrape a little money together and stole more from her violent grandmother. She bought male clothing at a junkshop, got a boy’s haircut and talked her way into a job on the Pocahontas. Somehow she had managed to avoid detection of her true sex on the Atlantic voyage.
It was time for John to leave for work. They agreed to continue talking later that evening, when John promised to think up a way of helping the boy who had suddenly become a girl to acquire a new identity. All that day the boy devised ideas in his head about how he might help her find employment and afford some feminine clothing. When he returned to the lodging house, Mrs Williams told him that ‘Dick’ had not been seen since early that morning. John waited hours for her return, but the girl who lived her life as a boy never came back to Thomas Street. Looking back, he reflected: ‘I have hoped ever since that Fate was as propitious to her, as I think it was wise, in separating two young and simple creatures, who might have been led, through excess of sentiment, into folly.’
Henry Morton Stanley gives readers of his memoirs scant information about Henry Hope Stanley, the man he claimed would later adopt him and change his name from John Rowlands to his own. He fails to reveal that the older man was also British, born near Manchester in 1815, the son of John Stanley and Selina Howard. Henry Hope Stanley’s father had died when the boy was very young and his mother had remarried a local Episcopalian clergyman, the Reverend Brookes from Mouton Eccles. At the age of twenty-one and like hundreds before him, he had crossed the Atlantic to seek a better life in America. A younger brother followed a year later. Perhaps the Stanley brothers had felt excluded from their mother’s life once she had presented her new husband with a son, named James Howard Brooks?
Henry Hope Stanley arrived first in Charleston, South Carolina and later settled in New Orleans where he studied for the ministry, was ordained and preached at Episcopalian churches between Nashville and Savannah for the next two years. But the preacher lost his religious fervour and with advice from business members of his congregation, took up another life as a shopkeeper. Later he became a partner in a brokering business called the Commercial Cotton Press, which acted as an agent between upriver planters and New Orleans merchants. Mr Stanley also owned a large plantation called Jefferson Hall in Tangipahoa, near Arcola, which was managed in his absence by a widow with young daughters.
Mr Stanley married twice, the first time at age twenty-eight to a Texan girl who ran a boarding house to supplement their income. The first Mrs Stanley died from typhoid while her husband was absent on a business trip. By the time he returned home, his wife had been dead nearly a month.
Four years later during a visit to England to see his mother, Henry Hope Stanley met and married a pretty and petite teenage girl, Frances Mellor. The couple were unable to produce children of their own, so adopted two daughters, Joanna and Annie. By the time John Rowlands appeared on the scene, Joanna had already fled the family home, eloping with a coach driver. Stanley’s memoir, however, states that Mr and Mrs Stanley were childless and had once visited an orphanage with a view to adopting a child ‘but they had made no choice, from over-fastidiousness’. The Stanleys’ English origins, the death of the first Mrs Stanley and the existence of two stepdaughters do not merit any mention in Henry Morton Stanley’s memoirs – unusual for a man who would later go into minute detail about people and incidents in accounts of his own exploits.
He relates a melodramatic story of how he discovered Frances Stanley seriously ill with fever while her husband was away on business. It was complete fabrication. He claims to have shared in a round-the-clock sickbed vigil with the family maid, Margaret, remaining in the house day and night. When morning came, the boy had to go to work, but told Margaret he would request leave and continue to help looking after Mrs Stanley in her husband’s absence. In his account the store’s new owner was outraged that the boy dared ask for time off and told him to go to the devil, so he resigned and returned to his seat outside Mrs Stanley’s sick room. Her condition worsened and a doctor was summoned. There was little he could do. Margaret and John sat with her throughout. In another Dickensian moment, readers are told:
With my heart throbbing painfully, and expecting I know not what, I entered on tiptoe. I saw a broad bed, curtained with white muslin, whereon lay the fragile figure of the patient, so frail and delicate that, in my rude health, it seemed insolence in me to be near her. It had been easy for me to speak of illness when I knew so little of what it meant; but, on regarding its ravages, and observing the operation of death, I stood as one petrified. . . . Margaret pushed me gently to the bedside, and I saw by the dim light how awfully solemn a human face can be when in saintly peace. Slowly, I understood how even the most timid woman could smilingly welcome death, and willingly yield herself to its cold embrace. . . . While listening at the door, I had wished that, in some way, I could transfuse a portion of my fullness of spirit into her, that she might have the force to resist the foe; for surely, with a little more courage, she would not abandon husband, friends and admirers, for the still company in the churchyard. . . .
Frances Stanley opened her eyes and told the young man: ‘Be a good boy. God bless you!’ Minutes later, she was dead.
By coincidence, Mr Stanley’s brother arrived in New Orleans shortly afterwards and took charge of the burial arrangements and the running of the household. He assumed young Rowlands was some sort of domestic retainer and paid him no attention. Days later, Margaret sent a note to Mrs Williams’ house telling John that the body had been embalmed, encased in a coffin and was due to be shipped upriver to Mr Stanley in St Louis.
Without the Stanleys and regular employment the boy grew increasingly despondent. He managed to secure odd jobs until he heard from a fellow lodger that the brig Dido needed deck hands to work on river routes. He was taken on as crew and earned enough for the fare to go in search of Mr Stanley.
In November 1859, John Rowlands purchased a ticket to St Louis where, within an hour of arriving, he discovered Mr Stanley had returned to New Orleans. With no money in his pocket for a return ticket, the boy went in search of more work. He learned that a barge was travelling downriver on a month-long voyage carrying lumber. Its owner needed an assistant to help with deck duties and assist the cook and John was taken on with the warning that there was no place on board for slackers and that he must be prepared to ‘muck in’ with everything from pulling the long oars to peeling potatoes and scouring pans.
Life on the barge gave the boy a chance to study the mighty Mississippi, its currents, eddies and whirlpools, unaware that these observations and impressions would one day be applied as knowledge and understanding to Africa’s river systems and their waters’ many moods.
The voyage ended when the barge arrived at lumberyards between Carroltown and New Orleans. It was a long walk into the city, but with determination and fortitude, the boy headed in the direction of Charles Street – and Henry Hope Stanley. He knocked on the door of the smart house and waited. The lock turned, the door opened and there stood ‘the only friend I seemed to possess in the whole of America’.
His reception by Mr Stanley was remembered as being ‘so paternal that the prodigal son could not have been more delighted’. The boy’s absence from New Orleans had increased his affections for his friend: outside his company he was shy, silent and morose; with him he was different – confident, outgoing and conversational.
John entered the parlour he had sat in so often with the Stanleys and told the older man how he had shared Mrs Stanley’s last moments, gone in search of work and of his voyage downriver on the barge. Mr Stanley listened carefully to the boy’s story and said he would now take charge of his future. He had wondered what had become of John Rowlands, having visited the store and found he had left his job. Knowing how friendless and unsophisticated the lad was, he had searched the streets for him, and now they were reunited, he said he would oversee his education ‘for the business of life’ and be to him what a real father ought to be.
As a workhouse boy, he had often imagined what kind of a person he might have become with the support of loving parents. He daydreamed about how wonderful it would be if someone claimed him as their own son. Now it was happening. He recalled: ‘Before I could quite grasp all that this declaration meant for me, he had risen, taken me by the hand, and folded me in a gentle embrace. My senses seemed to whirl about for a few half-minutes; and, finally, I broke down, sobbing from extreme emotion. It was the only tender action I had ever known, and, what no amount of cruelty could have forced from me, tears poured in a torrent under the influence of the simple embrace.’
Looking back to his early years, the Victorian explorer recollected: ‘The golden period of my life began from that supreme moment!’ Again, the truth was rather different.